Bad Lens, Original Pancakes, and Life Aquatic

[liralen]

Saturday morning started a little late. Jet asked me to do morning duty, so I went and slept like a lump on his bed while he slept, got up, played, dressed, and finally got tired of me doing nothing. So he went out the door and I followed him to find John already up and going. I'd been up until midnight writing and reading, so I wasn't feeling too chipper. But it was already 8, so I had no real excuse after eight hours of sleep.

I put in a new pair of contacts and since my eyes usually feel pretty grainy in the morning, I didn't think much of my eyes feeling... well... grainy. We decided to go out for breakfast.

While we were in the car headed to Boulder and the Original Pancake house and the defrost felt like it was sandpapering my eyes. Grr. It was raining hard, so that was a little odd as I would have thought drying would have done it.

We ran through the rain with hoods on to get into the restaurant. Well... John and Jet ran while I walked and savored the cool wet. Once in there, Jet engaged the greeter in a long conversation about his trucks until there were a few people in line after him, waiting to get signed up for a table. That's about when I realized that it was JUST my left eye. Hm. It was just killing me, so I finally just took out the disposable lens and left it on a napkin. I had nothing to put it in for later experimentation, so I just had to trash it.

So I went through breakfast feeling half-blind. It was a great breakfast. I had corned beef hash and basted eggs. The hash was good and chunky. My three buttermilk pancakes went to Jet, who devoured two of the three with alacrity. I replaced them with a single "French crepe", which was actually filled with strawberry jam and slathered with a "tropical syrup" with what tasted like pineapple and coconut hints. Jet ate a little of the tropical syrup but decided he really liked the regular better, with lots of butter. John had sausage, eggs, and pancakes and enjoyed them a lot. We saw one of the humungeous baked apple pancakes go by and I wanted to order one, but it's big enough that I probably couldn't eat it without some company to help. :-)

It was a great breakfast. From there we went to a little store in the midst of the new Erie area, which is in the midst of a bunch of new development. It's a little "grocery store" that specializes in local and organic items. It had an espresso shop, a deli, and a full-service meat counter and bakery. But what it had in service it lacked in shelves and shelves of basic stuff like in a quote-unquote-real grocery store. It had a nice organic produce section. The meats were really fresh and they had piles of Alaskan salmon at a good price, but nothing pre-packed or pre-cooked other than the nearly full meals you could get in the deli. There were no shelves of hardware, cereal, medications, name brand pop, cookies, crackers, seasonal junk, or other stuff that the big super grocery/pharmacy stores now have. The espresso bar was excellent, though, and they had locally roasted coffees for sale and for drinking. Yum.

John said it was more of a very high end Quickie Mart than a super store, and I agreed. Perfect for the neighborhood, though, as it was a good stopping place for nearly all the food and just the fresh food one might want. It is definitely a product of this time and age, when grocery stores have spread out to be EVERYTHING, and there's more demand, now, for something local, personal, and very food-centric with a mind for the people that will spend quite a bit of money for great foods rather than just concentrating on cheap bulk.

It's actually quite encouraging to see that the place was packed and the three registers were quite busy. Given that they'd only been open a week, that's quite good.

Jet was asleep so we went home. I did a little grocery shopping to fill in gaps that we hadn't filled there. They were out of their artisan breads. And I had a strata to make for a brunch potluck at the church tomorrow. We're going on the summer schedule of just a service at 9, no Sunday School anymore, so we'll have more of our Sundays to play with.

When I got home, John was playing with a broken iPOD our neighbor had given him, and he declared the hard disk defunct. Given that it's $250 just to send it in, it would be mostly worthless, other than the 10% discount Apple gives if you recycle a defunct iPOD with them. It did, however, teach me that I probably wanted a Shuffle, a solid-state iPOD rather than one of the disk-driven ones. If/when I got one. The concept of the 10% discount was intriguing, though.

Also, Jet had woken up and Mikayala wanted to play, so she came over and they played together pretty well until they wanted to see Monsters Inc. Mikayla has a TV in her bedroom, with her toys, and she gets movies there, and she really wanted to watch a movie AND play toys at the same time... so she went home soon after that. While they were playing, though I got through half of A Hat Full of Sky. I have to put it on the list of books I'm going to buy, especially since Kathy already gave Jet The Wee Free Men, which was so good. I love the little, rough, tough, and fast Pictsies.

I finished the other half of the book as Jet contentedly watched his movie after Mikayla went back home to play her way. John said it was no fair I could read that fast, as it had taken him about three weeks to get through it.

For some reason I can read Prachett in big gulps and gobbles, while Cherryh has to be taken a little bit at a time. Her language is so dense with imagery, concept, convoluted reasons on reasons, and a too real reflection of the complexity of emotional attachments I have to digest every few pages before I can go on.

We ended up with hot dogs for dinner, as John was busy and I was busy and... well it was dinner time. Jet decided he didn't want anything, so we ate, and then he asked for rice with teriyaki sauce and sprinkles. So he got them and he ate about half again as much as he usually does. Hm.

We watched The Life Aquatic while dinner managed to happen, and I made the strata while it was going on. It's a lot more random than I'd originally expected. Good, though, in an odd kind of way. I really hadn't expected the OK Corral-like bits. But Jet mostly ignored the movie to play with Lego and trains. The bad language made me blink a bit, too, but oh well, it's just language. Of course, Jet's probably filed it away for examination at a different time.